The MessageFormatter class

(PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PHP 7, PECL intl >= 1.0.0)

Introduction

MessageFormatter is a concrete class that enables users to produce
concatenated, language-neutral messages. The methods supplied in this
class are used to build all the messages that are seen by end users.

The MessageFormatter class assembles messages from various fragments (such
as text fragments, numbers, and dates) supplied by the program. Because of
the MessageFormatter class, the program does not need to know the order of
the fragments. The class uses the formatting specifications for the
fragments to assemble them into a message that is contained in a single
string within a resource bundle. For example, MessageFormatter enables you
to print the phrase "Finished printing x out of y files..." in a manner
that still allows for flexibility in translation.

Previously, an end user message was created as a sentence and handled as a
string. This procedure created problems for localizers because the
sentence structure, word order, number format and so on are very different
from language to language. The language-neutral way to create messages
keeps each part of the message separate and provides keys to the data.
Using these keys, the MessageFormatter class can concatenate the parts of
the message, localize them, and display a well-formed string to the end
user.

MessageFormatter takes a set of objects, formats them, and then inserts
the formatted strings into the pattern at the appropriate places. Choice
formats can be used in conjunction with MessageFormatter to handle
plurals, match numbers, and select from an array of items. Typically, the
message format will come from resources and the arguments will be
dynamically set at runtime.

User Contributed Notes 1 note

MessageFormatter does not work with DateTime instances as parameters in PHP < 5.5. Instance will be converted to timestamp with value 0 (e.g. 1970-01-01) and following Notice will be raised: „Object of class DateTime could not be converted to int“. You have to manually convert the instance to timestamp in these old PHP versions.